Enthralled By the Hearthstone

My first ever experience dealing with collectible card games was back when I was in elementary school and I started to collect Pokemon cards. But since then I have grown out of such interests--that is until Hearthstone came along.

I knew about Hearthstone for a while, and it was not until it was officially released that I decided to give it a shot. But honestly I only started to play because of the World Of Warcraft mount that you could win. However, it seems that Hearthstone has enthralled me with its siren song as I find myself playing it far more than I ever intended to.

Like any other card game, your goal is to defeat your opponent by reducing their hit points to 0. Each player starts off with 30 hit points, and 1 mana gem.

Mana Gems summon your minions; in other words, they are how you use your cards. After each round you and your opponent gain a single mana gem, up to a maximum of 10. You can use all of your mana gems if you choose to in a single round--don’t worry, they fully replenish after each round.

Before starting, you must pick a hero to play as. They consist of the classes from World of Warcraft: Warrior, Mage, Hunter, etc. I was a bit disappointed that there was not a Death Knight hero to play as since death knights are my favorite characters from the Warcraft universe.

Each hero has a special ability that can only be used once per turn. For example, the mage use a fireball that costs 2 mana and deals 1 damage to your opponent.

Most of the cards are really cool, and I found myself using a lot of cards that have the taunt ability on them. Cards come in different levels of rarity as well--I managed to get an epic Molten Giant card.

The Molten Giant requires 20 mana, but costs 1 less mana for each damage you have taken, so at 10 health you can drop this bad boy for 0 mana. The card has 8 health and hits for 8 damage and if you give this card windfury--which allows any card to attack twice in one round--and you can scare the pants off of your opponent.

Playing against an AI turns me into a raging titan of pure hatred because they always seem to use the cheapest and most annoying tactics ever conceived; this is especially true for the “expert” versions of them. Although playing against another person is quite fun and exciting for me, I have not turned into a raging titan yet.

Don’t worry too much about difficulty, or figuring out how to play. The game has an in-depth tutorial that will explain everything, plus you’ll find yourself getting better the more you play. There really is not much of a learning curve unless you are planning on fighting in the ranked roster.

Even if you are not really into card games, I highly suggest you give Hearthstone a shot. It’s free and it’s a lot of fun, even when you’re waiting for your opponent to take their turn, just click on the board at random you’ll be surprised what you can do.

Hearthstone is developed and published by Blizzard and was released March 11, 2014 on PC.

Our Rating

10

Hearthstone is a lot of fun, even for those who are not into card games all too much.

It's got a progression system that is directly tied to it's financial model, allowing one to literally skip massive amounts of time played ingame by buying packs.
This in itself as far as I'm concerned at least, is OK.. I mean it lets people who can't spend time playing stay up to speed but at a cost, you can't put in the time? a few quid will keep you relevant instead.

However...

You cannot compete with someone in this regard because of limitations on gold earning. Gold from wins are daily capped, daily quests are randomly generated and can range from painful to useless, and all in all outside of massive streaks in arena mode it's outright insanely hard to stay self sufficient. When you take into account that the matchmaking is in no way directly influenced by this advantage in terms of acquisition, the result is potentially mismatched games.

It's a freemium game, and while it's not the worst freemium game, it's certainly NOT deserving of a 10. After all it released with bugs after a "open shop beta" stage, and as expected due to their financial choices there is a terrible schism in the community meaning the forums are quite literally a cesspit of personal attacks for not praising Blizzard unquestionably, with an exasperating abundance of straw men arguments.

It may not be a big advantage purchasable after all even, but that depends on your perspective and what you're comfortable with and consider significant, and I was in no way comfortable with them using a twinned financial and progression model without adding in enough depth or developmental "checks and balances" to at least mask it, so ultimately I found it to be a lazily designed game that frankly deserved better.

On the plus side, they at least haven't pulled an EA and snuck in the poison AFTER initial reviews, got to at least give them that.

Just my 2 cents though, after all opinions are like bum-holes... everyone has one.

holy crap! THAT is a novel. I understand where you are coming from, I only experienced a handful of matches with other players, and did not even dare to try out the Arena Mode, that felt too hardcore for me. I'm certainly not the best at card games, nor do I really enjoy most of them. But since Hearthstone is free, and I found nothing wrong with it (besides some rage inducing AI)

I didn't bother with buying packs, and I can agree that most of the quests are annoying. But if you play Hearthstone like you do World Of Warcraft, with trying to get your daily cap all the time. I can see how things can get very frustrating.

I guess im coming at this game with a casual mindset, with no intention to get every card ever. Nor try to be the best at it.